


New Foundations

by scioscribe



Category: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016)
Genre: Building A New Life, Developing Relationship, Everybody Lives, Minor Chirrut Îmwe/Baze Malbus, Multi, Post-Star Wars: Return of the Jedi, Post-War
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-07
Updated: 2020-12-07
Packaged: 2021-03-09 18:54:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 10,439
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27791095
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/scioscribe/pseuds/scioscribe
Summary: After the war, they almost know where they're going. That doesn't mean they know how to get there.
Relationships: Cassian Andor & Jyn Erso & Chirrut Îmwe & K-2SO & Baze Malbus & Bodhi Rook, Cassian Andor/Jyn Erso/Bodhi Rook
Comments: 10
Kudos: 49
Collections: Heart Attack Exchange 2020





	New Foundations

**Author's Note:**

  * For [estelraca](https://archiveofourown.org/users/estelraca/gifts).



Jyn put her feet up on a slightly squashed cargo box, its warped plasticine cracking further still under the weight of her boots. Her head felt gummy with exhaustion, but she wasn’t ready to sleep quite yet. They had all been out here for hours, watching the fireworks and listening to the music.

The forest floor here was strangely sandy, and she trailed her fingers through it, tracing their abbreviated call-sign, R1, and then the Alliance insignia. After a moment she added Saw’s too—what he’d had of one. A quick, hard slash of a symbol, more a code than anything else.

She was a little drunk, but she could have been drunker. She wouldn’t mind that.

She tried out the words she’d already heard everybody but them saying: “The war’s over.”

Chirrut lifted his chin in a kind of nod. The angle made his whole face glow gold from the fireworks.

Cassian said, “Only officially.”

“Even I wasn’t going to say that,” K said. “Not yet, anyway.”

“Officially is enough for me,” Baze said. “At least for tonight.” He was watching Chirrut: somehow it was _watching_ , not just _looking at_ , even though Chirrut was nearly still.

“Sweeping all the troubles out of the galaxy would be a lot of time and work,” Chirrut said. “In the mornings sometimes, I already feel like an old man.”

“You already look like an old man,” Baze said.

“I don’t want to wait for a perfect peace only to be too old to enjoy it.” He flicked a pebble in Baze’s direction.

“The Empire isn’t a tree someone can just chop down,” Cassian said. There was the slightest thickened slur to his voice: that Ewok rotgut was more potent than any of them had guessed, and their hosts had poured it out for them practically by the kettleful. “The roots will be spread through every world that was under its control. Pulling them all up will take a lifetime.”

“I said that,” Chirrut pointed out.

“It doesn’t have to be your lifetime,” Bodhi said. He shrugged. He hadn’t trimmed his beard over the last few days, with everything that had been happening, and it made dark shadows on his cheeks; he looked older that way. His hands had gotten pitted with scar tissue from sparks hitting him over and over again as faulty X-wing control panels blew on him.

He’d had bad luck, Jyn thought, and he wasn’t the kind to want to run away from it. He’d told her once that he wanted to fly as many assignments for the Rebellion as he had for the Empire, and she didn’t know if he’d done that yet. If he was willing to stop, then so was she. She thought her father would want them to stay together.

But she wanted them all together, if she could manage that. If they could manage it.

“He’s right,” Jyn said to Cassian.

He shook his head. “I’m not made for anything else.”

“You’ll get bored,” K put in, surprising her. Even now, it was rare for the two of them to wind up on the same side of an argument. Most days they were lucky to be on the same side of the war. (The one that, as of six hours ago, no longer existed, not in the same way.) “I won’t, not in the same way, but my programming does reward novelty, so I’d prefer something other than repeatedly exercising the same circuits in the same pattern until I start to rust.”

Cassian said, “I don’t rust.”

“Everyone rusts,” Jyn said, thinking of Saw. Thinking of other things, too, because she wasn’t exactly short on examples. She’d been half-rusted herself, before she’d met them, like all the blood from all the killing had dried stiff around her joints, slowing her down. The muggy air on Wobani had clouded up her head, and she had let it, because it was just easier that way.

But Cassian wasn’t like her, not that way. She’d fucked up trying to run away from pain. His mistake was thinking he always had to chase it down, like something being hard proved it was necessary.

Baze stood up, bracing himself on Chirrut’s shoulder before he moved towards the keg of Ewok spirits. He filled another nutshell-glass and brought it over to Cassian.

“I have a cup already,” Cassian said.

Baze said, “Drink from this one instead.”

Cassian looked at him for a long moment, longer than Jyn would have liked, but then he took the cup, curling his fingers around it and holding it so tightly she thought it might crack in his hand. Maybe lifelines weren’t the kind of thing you could ever hold lightly. They all just had to grab onto each other in the same way.

“I understand,” K said. “It’s symbolic.”

“What _are_ we going to do, then?” Bodhi said, stretching out his hands to warm them before the fire.

“I have an idea,” Chirrut said, and Baze heaved a sigh so enormous that Jyn almost felt the ground shake from it.

“Here it comes,” he said. “I know all about your ideas.”

“After so many years, I might worry if you didn’t.” Chirrut leaned back, his hands flat against the mossed-over ground, his head tilted up like he wanted to feel the night breeze passing over his face. “The Temple of the Whills was destroyed, but before that, it stood for thousands of years.”

Bodhi said something quietly, in a language Jyn didn’t recognize: something local to Jedha, maybe. The cadence sounded religious somehow, reverent and so old they were dusty; the only words like that Jyn knew were the ones everyone in the Rebellion said. _May the Force be with you_ —like the air itself would tighten around whatever you wanted kept safe. It didn’t work, not exactly, but you said it anyway, because Cassian was right—there was always hope.

Whatever it was, Chirrut repeated it, and Baze didn’t—not aloud. Jyn thought she saw his lips move.

“Thousands of years,” Chirrut said again. “But the Empire had a way of turning history to dust.”

“We’ve all lived through that,” Cassian said.

“Out of the dust, things can rise again.” Chirrut nodded, like he was answering someone the rest of them hadn’t heard. “If we want another temple, we might as well build one ourselves.”

“That is of questionable utility,” K said.

“It doesn’t have _any_ utility,” Baze said. “But now is as good a time as any to do something no one really needs done.”

Cassian poured what moonshine was left in his old cup into his new one. There was something luminous about him now, even as drunk as he was and as much as his sweat reeked of the liquor: he looked softer somehow, like for the first time in his life, the edges of him had gotten smudged, and he wasn’t separate from everything anymore. It made Jyn realize that while she’d seen him happy, she hadn’t seen him relaxed, not until now.

She didn’t know what she would have done if he hadn’t taken that second cup from Baze, if he hadn’t chosen them—their ending, their fresh start—over the mission, over more endless middle.

She supposed she might have stayed with him. She just didn’t know if it would have been the right call or not.

Now she just watched him, waiting to see what he’d say, and he looked back at her like he wanted the same thing. Like he was waiting for her, which made a pang go through her heart.

“We’ve done a lot of necessary things,” she said. “I wouldn’t mind being useless for a change.”

She’d said it that way to give K the chance to needle her, but to her surprise, he didn’t.

***

They had lost the original _Rogue One_ —it had just taken too much damage on Scarif.

Its successor (the first one to actually get named, unconventionally, after their call-sign) had been a skiff, sleek and dark as a shadow-ray—a spy ship, not a fighter, which was why it now lay buried under all the snow and rubble they’d left behind them on Hoth. It had suited Cassian and Bodhi—Bodhi had always flown it with his lips slightly parted, with his cheeks flushed, like he could just as easily take it to bed, and Cassian had praised its precision and doled out credit to it like it was part of the team—and Jyn thought they probably still mourned it.

But she was just a soldier—a brawler and a bomber, one trained to fight quick and dirty—so her favorite was the one they’d ended the war with. It was a grubby freighter, gutted almost all the way to its exterior panels and rebuilt from the inside out.

“I’ve got simple tastes,” she’d said to Cassian. “Shields and speed and artillery and—”

 _And not enough sleeping room_ —that would have been the rest of it, if she hadn’t cut herself off.

But she had a feeling he understood what she’d meant, even so.

It was something she’d missed her whole life, that sense of people—people she could trust, people she could shut her eyes around—being close enough to touch. On their third ship, they’d had that. So much of the space had been given over to turret guns and engine power that there wasn’t much left for quarters; they were stuck with bedrolls laid out on the floor. And it had never been perfect—it had always meant waking up stiff and sore, for one thing—but it had been the safest she’d ever felt, lying shoulder-to-shoulder with them and listening to their breathing in the dark.

And now they had to leave it behind.

“You’re entitled to a ship,” the yard-keeper told them. “If you wanted to make a fuss about it, with your records you could probably even wrangle one each. But you can’t have that one. It has to stay in the fight.”

All the objections Jyn could think of were childish. _But it’s ours. But it’s home. But it’s the only one I want._

Or unsettling, really: _But it’s the only one where I can hear everybody breathing all night._

She swallowed, tasting salt, and nodded.

Cassian rested his hand gently against her upper arm, steadying her. “Do you have anything similar?”

The yard-keeper frowned, her brow wrinkling up, the loose red skin folding until it almost looked like a ladder. “There’s what, five of you?”

“Six,” Cassian said, swiftly enough that Jyn knew almost as soon as he did which one the yard-keeper hadn’t counted: K.

“I can get you something roomier,” the yard-keeper said. “I’m surprised you could sleep six on the _Rogue_. You don’t want it that similar.”

“We want it close enough.”

The yard-keeper flipped through her data-pad, muttering to herself as holos popped in and out of view, and then muttered at them to wait there; she stalked off through the yards, craning her neck to take in all the options.

Jyn, still watching her go, said, “You didn’t have to do that. I know it’s a tight fit.”

He shrugged. “You like it.”

“I do. But I’m one out of six.”

“If we were planning to live on it for good, we’d all have to compromise more. But it’s just to get us to where Chirrut wants to put down. We can stay squashed for the length of a trip without hurting anything.”

She put her hands in her jacket pockets, curling her fingers in to stop them from shaking. She couldn’t do anything about the smile on her face, and she guessed she didn’t want to, anyway. “I didn’t know I was that obvious, anyway. About liking it.”

“You spent a lot of time being lonely,” Cassian said, which wasn’t exactly an answer—except he didn’t really need to give her one, did he? He’d spent a lot of _his_ time deep in Imperial territory where his life had hung on whether he could read someone’s trustworthiness through something as small as the twitch of a muscle or the condition of their boots. Jyn had never had much of a sabacc face; she was probably as clear as glass to him. Maybe to the rest of them, too, for all she knew.

Once, that would have put her on edge. When she’d been with Saw’s irregulars, the cost of anybody but him seeing straight through her like that could have been death. Who wanted anything to do with Galen Erso’s daughter? You kept your secrets, or you died for them.

She’d gotten used to not worrying about that, but not—not quite yet—used to being used to it. She could still think, _This is nice_ , with the feeling that she’d stepped into a sunbeam.

“I’m not lonely anymore,” she said, and Cassian smiled at her. Then his gaze shifted to somewhere off behind her, and the smile stayed the same.

“Bodhi,” he said.

Jyn turned around and saw Bodhi jogging towards them. She raised her hand in a wave.

“You were going to get a ship without your pilot!” he called to them. “That’s not very smart.”

“That’s my fault,” Jyn said. “I thought they’d let us keep the _Rogue_. I didn’t think we’d get around to shopping.”

Bodhi looked slightly mollified. He must have really raced to meet them at the shipyard, too: his hair had come out of its usual tie and was mostly falling loose around his shoulders, the silky strands blowing around in the wind. “You haven’t accepted anything yet, have you?”

“No. The yard-keeper’s down there—she’s all yours.”

“Something like the _Rogue_!” Cassian said as Bodhi started off in the yard-keeper’s direction. “Something compact!”

“Got it!” Bodhi didn’t ask for an explanation. _Dank farrik_ , how transparent had she been? There was a difference between trusting people and just embarrassing yourself.

Or maybe not. Not with them.

She leaned against Cassian, who leaned back against her, the two of them holding each other up. The sun was high and hot, making sweat prickle on her scalp and the back of her neck, and she thought they both smelled like campfire smoke and clothes that had gone a little too long between washings.

She remembered when the thermal distribution strips had failed, on Hoth, and she and Cassian and Bodhi had wound up in bed together under piles of foil heating blankets and shaggy tauntaun furs, bare skin on bare skin on bare skin. Something had happened that night, when they’d all been restless. More than what should have happened—but not as much as she would have liked.

She watched as Bodhi caught up with the yard-keeper and got into an animated conversation with her, his hands cutting through the air as he tried to explain what they wanted.

He was right; they should have brought him from the start.

“I forgot,” she said softly.

“Forgot what?”

She didn’t know how to explain it. She still lived, sometimes, like she’d never joined the Rebellion at all, like there was only the fight, where you had the people next to you, or the odd bits and pieces of time out of battle, where you were more or less on your own—where you didn’t have any kind of structure to rely on, because outside the war, you were nobody’s business but your own. It was hard to shake old habits—somehow even harder when they were habits you’d never wanted, habits from a life you’d run away from as soon as you could.

She’d taken Cassian with her because he’d been right there when she’d had the idea to go pick up the _Rogue_ , that was all. Otherwise, she might have gone on her own.

You wouldn’t think that you could be planning a post-war retirement with five other people—that you could try to wrangle a ship where you’d all almost have to sleep on top of each other—and still forget, in the middle of all that, that you weren’t on your own.

That there were other people you could rely on. And, just as importantly, other people you needed to think of, sometimes—people who’d be hurt or out in the cold if you just left.

When she still didn’t answer, Cassian reached over and took her hand. His fingers were warm and sure, and she rubbed her thumb along his.

After a moment, he said, “I would have gone on fighting, you know.”

If they hadn’t talked him out of it, he meant. Well, not even talked him out of it—strong-armed him, really. Basically convinced him to take on a new life, Baze’s fresh cup.

“I know,” Jyn said.

“I’m a good captain.” There was an underlying ferocity in his tone, like he thought someone might argue otherwise. Who? Not her, surely. He had to know she’d have fought tooth-and-nail for him, fought until the last power cell in her blaster was nothing but black smoke and her strength was spent. If he was talking to anybody, it was to a ghost. “Not just a good spy and a good killer, when I’ve had to be, but good at seeing the chances we have to take, good at convincing people—”

“Good at giving us hope,” she said quietly.

“Yes.” He met her eyes, the same distant fierceness in his gaze. _Draven_ , she thought suddenly: it had to be Draven he was arguing with, Draven he felt like he had to explain himself to. Fucking Davits Draven. Jyn had never forgiven him, and clearly she wasn’t going to start today. “I came out of _nothing_ , out of _ashes_ , and I made myself exactly who I needed to be. Who they wanted me to be, and who I could be proud of being, at least some days. At least after you.”

He was finally seeing her again, and he looked both breathless and embarrassed now: she knew that feeling of having given away too much.

He said, “It’s hard to walk away from what you’ve been good at. From what’s been keeping you alive. Whether that’s a strategy or—or a designation, a duty. I just wanted you to know I understand. You’re not the only one who feels broken.”

“Maybe. I’m not the only one who’s healing, either.”

His mouth quirked. “No, you’re not. What do you think you’ll do at Chirrut’s temple?”

“Fuck if I know,” Jyn said honestly, which made him laugh. “I’m just hoping it’ll take so long to build it that I’ll have time to work something out. I don’t care that much, but I’ll need something to fill up the days. What about you?”

He shook his head. “I don’t even know what the Guardians of the Whills did, before the Empire turned them out and looted the temple. Baze and Chirrut don’t tell many stories about back then.”

And she understood that from Baze, who ignored everything Force-related that didn’t involve Chirrut, but she wasn’t sure why Chirrut didn’t reminisce more. Unless it was for Baze’s sake; in all likelihood, the two of them protected each other in a thousand ways the rest of them would never know about, let alone understand. They were both older than they looked— _older than I want to be,_ Baze had said once—and they’d been sworn to each other longer than Jyn had even been alive.

“Guess we’ll just have to make it up as we go along,” she said. “That’s a Rebel strength, isn’t it?”

“More than anything else.”

She shaded her eyes with her hand and watched as Bodhi and the yard-keeper seemed to come to some sort of agreement.

“I think we have our ship,” she said. “A good one, too, judging by his smile.”

***

It _was_ a good ship, at least by Jyn’s standards: not enough space and too many guns. General Solo had “borrowed” it from an old smuggler acquaintance who apparently hadn’t been sharp enough to mention when it needed to be returned, and its sordid past meant that it was riddled with hidden storage compartments.

“Chirrut will like finding them all,” Baze said to Jyn. “He likes puzzles.” His voice was heavy with a resignation that she didn’t believe for a second, especially given the soft smile on his face. “Puzzles and mysteries.”

He passed her one of the local pastries she could never remember the name of—a sweet and crumbly thing, some kind of ground-up dark stone fruit wrapped in edible red paper that melted on her tongue.

“Thanks,” Jyn said, biting into it and savoring the dense crackle.

“I’ll miss these, when we’re gone from here. I have a sweet tooth.”

Jyn smiled. “I know. I’ve seen the way you take your tea.”

“I grew up on tea without sugar. Shale tea—that’s what they called the kind we had, because it only came out gray or black, depending on how strong you made it, and we had a shale quarry, too. Everything seemed gray and black and not very sweet. We were poor.”

“Before the Empire?” From the way her parents had talked about it, the Republic had practically been a paradise—a tranquil galaxy of order and art and philosophy, with Jedi Knights strolling in courtyards and every night coming in with a picture-perfect purple-gold blush. With all the stars still in the sky, none of them deadened and stripped for their kyber.

Baze took another pastry, pinching it between his fingers. “All the evils we lay at the feet of the Empire were there before the Emperor, just like they’ll linger now that he’s gone. Cassian’s right about that much—we can leave the fight, but it’s still there. And it always was. Even before the fall, the Republic had enough to fight against, if you were the fighting kind. I wasn’t, not then. I just wanted sweeter tea.”

“How did you get it?”

He waited until he’d swallowed. “This was all in Hosai, the mid-southwest sector of Jedha’s sixth slice.” Jedha mapped itself like a segmented fruit, split into eighths from its north pole down. “When I was old enough, I bought a speeder. The only kind I could afford was falling apart, so a journey that should have taken three months took over a year—I kept having to stop and replace parts that had fallen off, and I could only pay for them by working in some tavern for a few weeks…” He peeled off a bit of red pastry-paper and ate it. “And then I was in the capitol, and for lack of anything better to do, I went to see the temple, where an apprentice Guardian gave me a cup of tea.”

“And it was Chirrut.”

“No.” He finished off the pastry.

“Then the tea was sweet, at least.”

“Bitterer than the shale tea. I almost spat it out on the floor.”

“This isn’t the story I thought I was listening to,” Jyn said.

His smile made the corners of his eyes crinkle. “And then, little sister, someone said, ‘I wouldn’t drink that if I were you, it’s very bitter.’ _That_ was Chirrut. We scoured the city together, that first year, drinking at every tea shop that would have us. Looking for what was sweetest.”

It took her a second to think of why that struck her as strange. “But he doesn’t take any sugar in his.”

“No,” Chirrut said from behind her. “But making all kinds of remarks about sweetness was much better for flirtation. It was too good an opportunity to pass up.”

Without even looking, Baze passed him one of the pastries, which Chirrut took, their fingers grazing each other slowly.

“I was telling her how you’d like finding the smuggling compartments on the ship. Then we just wound up talking about what we’d miss once we went off on your fool’s errand.”

“There will be sugar where we’re going,” Chirrut said.

Jyn sat up straighter. “Do you know where we’re going, then? Or are you just guessing?” Most worlds probably did have some source of sugar, after all.

“I know. A world called Dizars. The Force guided me.”

“He had K-2SO look at a map,” Baze said. He leaned back and stretched, rolling his shoulders back. There were a few more of the red pastry rolls on the platter in front of him, but Jyn noticed that he didn’t take another: he was done now, and it seemed he could walk away without any trouble.

It wasn’t that easy for Cassian. Jyn knew it cost him something to go Alliance Command and say that he was leaving with the rest of them, that he was done.

And if she hadn’t known, K would have told her. He did, in fact, while she was sitting around cutting up violet-colored tubers for that night’s dinner.

“I went with him,” K said.

“You can help, you know,” Jyn told him.

“I’m aware.”

He didn’t make a move to do it, though, unsurprisingly, so she just sighed and picked up another of the fleshy, disconcertingly damp tubers and started peeling it.

“Did they try to convince him to stay?” she said after a moment.

“Yes.” He paused—a microsecond’s worth of pause for anybody else, but with K you learned to detect these tiny hints of processing, the genuine hesitations that weren’t just him mimicking organic speech patterns. “They said they tried to convince you as well, but they were less surprised they failed there. Naturally. I could have told them they would.”

“Thanks, I think.” She brushed a spiral of peel off her knife. “They didn’t try too hard, though. I’m just a symbol to them, when you get right down to it, and Draven’s never going to trust me.”

“I sincerely doubt that General Draven trusts anyone. Even Cassian. Even me, though my memory banks are frequently uploaded to Alliance systems.”

“Are they,” Jyn said, not really asking. She arched her eyebrows. “I bet you edit them.”

“I’m not going to address that accusation. We were speaking of Cassian, whose value to the Rebellion has always been more practical—and effective—than symbolic.”

“As in, they’ve used him, and they want to go on using him.” Like the _Rogue_ , which they couldn’t requisition no matter how much blood they’d shed in it, because it was just too valuable to the cause. The Empire wouldn’t have had any qualms about just classing Cassian the same way—too useful, sorry—and keeping him. The Alliance wouldn’t do that, but that didn’t mean they didn’t want to.

“They made their case,” K said. “A few years ago, he would have said yes. I’m glad he didn’t.”

“I bet you could have talked him out of it, even then.”

“The probability of that is reasonable, but I wouldn’t have tried. I was likewise unaware of any other—options.”

“So was I, really.” She wiped her wrist across her forehead, pushing her hair out of the way. “So was Bodhi, I think, before my father.” Even now, the memory snagged at her, and she lowered her hand, briefly clasping the pendant on her necklace between her fingers. “Not Baze and Chirrut, though.” They’d lived through so much difference—that was probably part of it—but she thought the truth was they had always been more attuned to life than the rest of them, even before they’d had each other. Baze was, after all, the one who had traveled months just for the sake of sweeter tea.

Maybe the Force had something to do with it. If it did, score a point for Chirrut.

“Anyway,” Jyn said. “Strength in numbers.”

“It isn’t strength I’m worried about. It’s a sense of purpose.”

“He’s still our captain,” she snapped, grabbing the next tuber a little more forcefully than she needed to. She felt it threatening to bruise in her grip, and she had to work not to cut herself as she started to peel it. Her hands would shake if she let them. She wanted to say, _I’m worried about him too, you know,_ but K _did_ know, dammit—if he hadn’t known that, they wouldn’t be having this conversation in the first place. He wasn’t the model of efficiency he thought he was. He wasn’t telling her what he thought she needed to know, he was just—conferring with her. Not that he’d admit it.

“It may not be ideal to practice some kind of hierarchy in civilian life,” K said. “Also, your adherence to that structure was questionable even at the best of times.”

“That’s rich, coming from you.”

“I always obey Cassian’s orders unless they’re clearly misguided.”

“Right.” She finished off the last tuber and dropped it into the pot. “Anyway, we’re leaving tomorrow. Then he’ll have two weeks in space to try to think of a new purpose.”

“I hope he does.”

Jyn swallowed. “Yeah. Me too.” She cleared her throat. “I really thought that partway through all this, you’d cave and start helping me, by the way.”

“I can see we still don’t understand each other,” K said.

***

Two weeks of non-stop hyperspace before they reached Dizars.

“Not entirely non-stop,” Bodhi said. He pulled up a map display and slid his finger along a highlighted route. “The hash-marks are where we switch out long enough to let the drive recharge. That’s what my mother taught me, anyway, but my mum—both of them were pilots—said the truth is the manufacturers build the recharging times in on purpose. People can’t handle continuous hyperspace for too long without getting a little… unstable. But pilots used to think they were the exceptions, that it didn’t matter if all the connections in their head had started to feel a little loose. They could handle it. But they couldn’t, not in the end, and neither could the passengers. It’s just like close confinement in normal space, only multiplied at a ridiculous rate. An unbroken day in hyperspace is like an unbroken week outside of it, to most organic lifeforms. So we move in and out. The drive recharges, and so do we.”

He’d said all of that cheerfully, like it was an ordinary story.

Jyn said, “That’s not exactly reassuring.”

“It’s fine. This ship was built under the Republic codes—the drive cycles out right on schedule to keep us all psychologically intact. Imperial standards aren’t nearly that strict.”

“The _Rogue_ used to be Imperial.”

Bodhi smiled, and it was a different smile than she’d seen on him before. All their smiles used to be exhausted and hard-won; this was the first time she’d gotten to see him look _teasing_. “Don’t worry. I almost always remembered to program her to drop out at the standard schedule.”

“That’s very funny,” Jyn said. “Don’t ever tell me how much of that story is true. I don’t think I want to know.”

There was the smile she was more familiar with, the one that looked like it could slip away any second. “You’ll have to know for sure if you want to start flying.”

“I don’t,” Jyn said, surprised. “I can fly all right—not like you, nothing fancy, but straight shots, lighter craft, things like that—and handle a speeder. I never needed anything more. Unless you want to teach me.”

“No—or yes, if you want—I mean I just thought that’s why you were up here. Instead of with Cassian.” He studiously turned his gaze back to the map, like it was the most fascinating thing he could think of.

She felt her face grow warm. “It’s not like that,” she said quietly. “Me and Cassian.”

“Oh.” His cheeks were stained darker now, too, although at least his beard helped camouflage it a little. “I just thought—since nothing ever happened after that night—” He poked at the map display again, squinting at it. “And the two of you feel like you fit hand-in-glove. There’s no hand and glove and… third thing.”

“Depends on the species, doesn’t it?” Jyn said, nudging at him until he looked back at her, his dark eyes full of feelings she knew all too well. “I wanted more from that night too. We could have picked up where we left off, but two nights after that, the whole place was in flinders.”

“It did put a damper on things,” Bodhi agreed.

But that was an easy excuse. The Rebels, the lifelong ones, all joked about how easy it was, in their line of work, to ditch a lover—you got reassigned or your bed blew up or, if you were really desperate, you had the Empire sort things out for you by getting you killed. And as for the three of them, well, their blood had been blown up. It wasn’t their fault. It made a good alibi for cowardice.

Because the truth was, she wasn’t sure she wanted to risk what she had—that floor covered in bedrolls, the one that comfortably slept six (not that K ever actually lay down). She just barely knew how to have family, how to have friends instead of just comrades in arms. And she and Bodhi and Cassian weren’t Baze and Chirrut. They were hand-in-glove only if the glove was full of broken glass. Against all odds, they’d settled in and gotten comfortable with each other, but if they tried something new—it was moving around, and sooner or later, they’d get cut. They’d hurt each other.

“You’re not wrong, though.” She felt like she was clumsily feeling her way towards something. “It’s easier for me, with Cassian. We’ve always felt like two sides of the same coin—and besides, I didn’t do anything to him.”

“You didn’t do anything to me either,” Bodhi said. “Not the last time I checked.”

“No, but—” They had never talked about it. “I know what Saw did to you.”

And she knew what that had done to him. She’d seen people after they’d been given to Bor Gullet, after they’d had their minds filleted and their secrets ripped away. Bodhi had come through it better than almost any of them, but she still saw the signs on him. She still saw him reach for words, ordinary ones, and have them refuse to come, like he was throwing a die and having it come up blank. She’d heard his nightmares—of course she had, all mashed up together like they were. She’d come over to him silently afterwards with a water basin and a generous pour of a stiff drink, if they were lucky enough to have any on hand. She’d sponged the sweat off his face on the rare occasions he’d been too rattled to do it himself.

“You’re not Saw,” Bodhi said.

“He helped make me who I am.”

“So did Galen, and he saved me.” He wasn’t back to pretending to look at the map, at least. There was a breathtaking intensity to him when he was like this, and she supposed that was one reason she was pulled to him and Cassian both—she’d spent a long time trying not to feel, and both of them felt things so much she could feel the heat of them burning with it. “For years, I did cargo runs for the Empire, and do you know why? Because it was a job. Because the Rebellion was just an idea, but the Empire was there every day, paying credits into our accounts. I helped move the kyber that was pulled out of Chirrut and Baze’s old temple, the same kyber that powered the Death Star. I walked in and out of your father’s prison. All that made me who I am too. There’s no getting around our pasts, not for any of us. Not for Cassian either.”

“And that’s a lot,” Jyn said.

“Not enough to get in the way,” Bodhi said stubbornly. “Otherwise we wouldn’t even be here. We’d have all said we were too far gone to try to play heroes. Too far gone for hope.”

He was right. Right-ish, anyway. She didn’t know that it did anything about Cassian feeling like all his roots had been torn up, or about her needing all of them so much it hurt, or about how Bodhi felt like he was on the outside looking in.

But: hope. Lots of things were built on hope.

She tried out her own version of Bodhi’s teasing smile, testing how it felt. Not natural, not yet—but maybe soon. It was like learning to pull your ship out of hyperspace, she thought: these were the kinds of pauses that could keep you whole enough to get where you were going. “Not a bad speech.”

“I learned it from you,” Bodhi said. From the way he was looking at her, she could guess that her smile passed muster.

Fair was fair, then. She could learn something from him too. She could try trusting that they could figure this out.

They’d wished themselves to stranger heights than that, surely.

But they couldn’t use their two weeks onboard the _Liberty_ —Bodhi had named it, and everyone else had declared it too sentimental—to sort things out, even if she was tempted to. Admittedly, it had the advantage that they couldn’t run away from anything, not in a pressurized container like this where they could barely get around without stepping on each other, but she wasn’t going to inflict all that on Baze and Chirrut. Nobody wanted to be stuck within ten feet of people trying to work out a love affair.

She especially felt like she owed it to them to keep things from getting awkward since, after all, it was more or less her fault that they were all stuck on top of each other. If Chirrut and Baze had to spend two weeks ducking into one of the old smugglers’ compartments to get laid—and had to come out all dusty afterwards, with a spiderweb matted in Baze’s hair—then whatever she and Bodhi and Cassian had, or didn’t have, could damn well wait until they arrived on Dizars. And that wasn’t cowardice—whatever her mind tended to accuse her of when she was trying to sleep—but just courtesy.

All right, maybe it was a little bit cowardice. But it wasn’t her fault she’d wound up having something to lose.

But they still slept close to each other, even closer than the confines of the _Liberty_ forced them to. Jyn lay curved against Bodhi’s back, the boundaries between them fuzzy, and she saw the hair on the back of his neck stir one night as she said, “I love a lot of things that don’t come easily, you know.”

_Just because I don’t understand you as well doesn’t mean I want you less._

“Do you really?” Bodhi said sleepily.

“Sure.” She pressed her hand against his back, between his shoulder blades, and felt him lean back against her.

“No, I mean—do you really love a _lot_ of things?”

She had to bury her face against his shoulder to stifle a laugh. “It’s getting up there,” she said. “Numbers are rising all the time.”

On the other side of her, Cassian stirred. “What are you two talking about?” he said, rubbing at his eyes with the heel of his hand. He didn’t wait for an answer before throwing his arm over Jyn’s side and fitting himself against her. It amazed her, even now, that he could relax so deeply when he slept. She felt like it meant something that almost from the start, he’d been able to close his eyes around her. Around them.

***

Dizars was far enough away from its sun that even its summers were cool. When they worked early in the morning, Jyn could see her breath in the air, and even when the day’s temperature peaked, even when they were hauling bricks and wood by hand, none of them stripped off their shirts.

They could have imported other materials—Corellia made a kind of fibrous, construction-grade flimsiplast, for one thing, and while Jyn remembered it having the texture and smell of weeks’ old porridge, it was child’s play to build with it. All they would have had to have done was unrolled massive, sticky sheets of the stuff. Prop it up, shape it—done.

She brought this up to Chirrut, who scoffed at it.

“It would be ugly.”

“It could be ugly now,” Baze said. Sandy brick dust had worked its way up his shirtsleeves, in delicate, powdery patterns; when he wiped some sweat off his forehead, his hand left a muddy smear behind. “You wouldn’t know one way or the other.”

“I knew with you,” Chirrut said.

“He has you there,” Jyn said to Baze. “Unless you want to try to convince him you’re hideous, and I can’t help you with that.”

Baze palmed Chirrut’s head with one dusty hand as he walked over to get another load of bricks. “I suppose I can admit you have taste.”

“And it isn’t about what it looks like,” Chirrut said, turning his attention back to Jyn. “Movement and time open pathways between us and the Force. When we pour ourselves into this work, when we use the materials we get from this place, the sense of life here deepens. The light gathers. Can you feel it?”

Jyn breathed in, letting herself take in the crisp air. This part of Dizars had a high concentration of natural fruit trees, and the breeze smelled sweet and briny at the same time, like pickled citrus rind, like an orchard that had grown up in the middle of an ocean. She could feel a lot of things, but she wasn’t sure if any of them counted as the Force. But around Chirrut, she did feel more aware somehow, conscious of a pebble under her boot subtly altering her stance, of the slight soreness in her arms. Of the sense of calm that had suffused through her lately, for that matter.

“I don’t know,” she said. “I’m still getting used to letting myself feel much at all.”

“If it helps, you’re doing well,” Chirrut said. The kindness in his voice, the wry gentleness of it, was another thing she was glad to feel. “This place has been good for you.”

It had been. It’d been good for all of them but Cassian.

Chirrut knew what she was thinking, but she wasn’t going to give the Force any credit for that: she had to be ludicrously obvious, especially on this particular subject.

“You can’t make him find what he’s searching for.”

“I could if he’d just change what he’s looking for.”

“I think he’s trying,” Chirrut said.

“I know. That doesn’t make waiting for him any easier.”

He smiled, the crinkles around his eyes deepening, and to Jyn’s surprise, he said softly, “Yes. I know that much from experience.”

It was enough to make her wonder if the story of him and Baze had had rougher edges once, if it had been like a stone worn smooth by long handling. Her mother had told her something like that once: that love was a charm you carried with you, and it wasn’t always in the same shape. Sometimes it was a necklace worn close to your heart, bumping along against your breastbone all day; sometimes it was a ring on your finger, tight and fitted to you, a part of the same hands that did your daily work. Sometimes it was a bracelet with a faulty clasp, and you always had to watch to see that it didn’t fall.

And sometimes it was unpolished and uncut, and you clutched it tightly in your hand or carried it in your pocket. And every day, you had to choose whether or not to hold onto it.

She’d only met Chirrut and Baze after their love had become a smooth stone set in rings they couldn’t have wrenched away from themselves if they tried, but that didn’t mean that they hadn’t been like her and Bodhi and Cassian, once. Maybe they’d had to carry their love around a while, until they knew what it was like for their fingers to cramp from it.

More things that didn’t come easily.

She spent the rest of the day lugging bricks for Chirrut, but when the sun finally set, she went looking for Cassian.

He was down in the quarry with Bodhi and K, chiseling out enormous hunks of rock with a combination of pressurized tools and laser-cutters; he and Bodhi wore goggles to keep the dust out of their eyes and filter masks to keep it out of their lungs. They were all grimy with sand and crushed rock, far worse than just the up-to-the-elbows dustiness she and Baze had come away with. It looked like hard, unpleasant work, with a lot of squinting and measuring of density gradients, and it was past time for them to stop for the night.

“You look ridiculous,” Jyn called down to them.

Cassian straightened up first. “We look dusty.”

She shrugged. “That’s what I said.”

K stepped back and deployed some quick air-hose system Jyn envied, one that blasted his metal casing clean in a matter of seconds. “I believe I’m now neither dusty nor ridiculous. I’d like to say that we look efficient, but in point of fact, Cassian spent a lot of our time digging a completely unrelated hole.”

“I know you’d do it to me, but I’m surprised you’d inform on _him_ ,” Jyn said.

“It was a very large hole,” K said.

Bodhi pointed, and Jyn read weariness even in the angle of his finger. No wonder. They’d come equipped for horizontal rock mining, the chiseling away of cliffsides, not the kind of vertical digging-out Cassian had apparently been attempting. And K was right: it was a big hole. From a distance, it looked almost as bottomless as a rock worm tunnel.

“I was looking for kyber,” Cassian said. He took off his goggles and mask and walked to the stream, splashing water all over himself without regard for drenching his clothes. They were probably soaked through with sweat anyhow.

“Why?”

“How can there be a temple for the Guardians of the Whills if there’s nothing for them to guard?”

“Chirrut doesn’t seem to mind,” Bodhi said.

“Well, I’m not Chirrut.”

“No,” K agreed. “You’re notably testier, especially tonight.” He turned to Jyn and—slightly more, and for slightly longer, naturally—Bodhi, and added, “If the three of you have begun having regular sexual relations, I believe these changes in his temperament can be considered your problem. I’m allowed to opt out unless you fail miserably.”

“Charming,” Jyn said.

Bodhi sat down on a rock, took his goggles off, and began cleaning them as, apparently, an excuse not to look at anyone. In the grayish twilight, he and Cassian somehow managed to look both colorless and beautiful—as fuzzy and badly-toned as a low-data hologram but made out of light all the same, light that would buzz and crackle around your fingertips if you reached out for it. That was more Cassian, she decided: so close to her yet so hard to hold onto. Bodhi had seemed further away, but now she was sure they’d stay fixed to each other, if that was what they both wanted.

K was different still—clearly she was doomed to just go on caring about him no matter how much they rankled each other—but having to try to work him into all this right now might just make her head explode.

She thought it was interesting that none of them had pointed out yet that they weren’t, in fact, having regular sexual relations. Apparently they were in some silent accord to handle this as a unit even when they didn’t have to.

And why not? This was what Chirrut said worked for the Force, anyway: time and effort and place.

As she came down into the quarry, following the steep and scree-littered path that felt like it wanted to buck her off, she felt that sense of calm descend on her again. The air was different even with this relatively slight change in elevation: she lost the citrus-and-sea smell of the native orchards in a haze of laser-ozone and mineral-dense water. Slate tea with no sweetness to it. This wasn’t the right place to figure out where they stood with each other, but she kept using that excuse, didn’t she? There wasn’t going to be a right place unless they made one, so for right now, they’d just have to rely on effort and time.

K looked at her as she strode out onto the level ground at the quarry’s bottom. She tipped her chin in his direction, just a little: _I’ll do my best._

He nodded back, a light racing up and down one side of his torso casing. It could have meant anything from _I know_ to _well, that’s discouraging_ to—this one was unlikely— _thank you._

“I’ll see you when you return to camp,” K said before walking off.

Jyn envied how quickly he could move when he put his mind to it. That would be a nice trick. She wondered if he’d ever picked Cassian up under one arm and lugged him out of danger and, if so, how drunk she’d have to get Cassian before he’d ever tell her about it.

“So,” she said. She looked at Bodhi. “You made the speech last time.”

“What speech?” Cassian said.

“Just to her.” Bodhi rubbed some of the grime off his face. “And I’m too exhausted to have any insight right now.”

Fair enough. She said to Cassian, “There’s no kyber here. Chirrut never said there would be, and he never even said he was looking for any. And we should all be pretty damn _grateful_ there isn’t any, because if there was—let alone if it was up so close to the surface that some jackass with handheld tools could scrape it up—the Empire would have scraped all the topsoil off this world like a vegetable peel. Everything would be blasted and gone. For fuck’s sake, didn’t you read the report on the second Death Star?” She still fumbled over that name. It was like it burned her tongue. “The only way they had enough to build up another planet-killer was by fine-filtering through the debris of the first one. Think about that, about how much time they must have spent combing out the extraneous rubble, the damn _bones_ , just to get those little flecks of crystal. And you think you’ll find it by digging a really big hole? Last I checked, you were smarter than that.”

“Fine.” The word cracked against her like a whip. “So it’s a day’s worth wasted. You weren’t the one doing it, Jyn, so why should it bother you?”

She had to believe in the sense of peace he’d had that had let him sleep so deeply so close to them. She swallowed. “Because it’s still you and it’s still Bodhi. I don’t suppose K gets tired in the same way, but it’s a shame to waste him all the same, so him too. And it’s a day now, but sooner or later, it’s your whole life. Ask me how I know. You remember where you found me. You remember the kind of life I’d been living. You think it’s different because you’re actually looking for something, not just trying to get away? It doesn’t matter why you do it if it looks the same in the end.”

“It’s not the same,” Cassian said. His chin was set. Sweat streaked through the dirt on his cheeks, and his eyelashes threw funnily long shadows on his face. He was lovely, but she didn’t know how to tell him that. She suspected his looks had been just another Alliance tool, at least from time to time. “I need something to live for.”

She wanted to say, _We could be worth living for_ , because that was just about enough for her, but she suspected that was the wrong answer. If she and Bodhi became his purpose in life, that wouldn’t be a relationship, it would just be a horror story. She didn’t want Cassian using himself up in their names.

Instead, she said, “Life’s worth living for.”

He shook his head. “That’s not enough.”

“Then at least settle for living more lightly until the next thing comes along,” Bodhi said.

“Or _try_ ,” Jyn added before Cassian could come up with any kind of objection. “You said I wasn’t the only one who was broken, and I said I wasn’t the only one healing, either. We were both right.”

“It was one day’s worth of digging,” Cassian said, but the stubbornness in his voice didn’t entirely match his eyes. It was the same look he’d had when he’d said he’d aimed his blaster at her father but he hadn’t pulled the trigger—he knew the difference didn’t mean as much as he wanted it to. And this time, unlike then, he sighed and scrubbed away a little more grime. “I don’t know how to just live.”

And Chirrut’s Force, she knew without asking, didn’t mean much to him. There was no real aim, no direction to it but out and out and in and in. She responded to that, but she could see how he wouldn’t.

She could offer him something else, but she could already see the holes in every possibility. Make building the temple his goal? How long would that last, when he’d said himself that the temple was pointless without kyber at the heart of it? Even if he unearthed some deep love of construction, what happened when the building was done? She could ask him to change, but he wouldn’t.

And, she realized, she wouldn’t want him to, and neither would Bodhi. Not fundamentally, anyway. He needed to heal just like she did, but they weren’t going to become different people.

“Then try,” she said again. Her voice was shaking a little. “Like Bodhi said, until the next thing comes along. You went through years of war without being able to see an end to it, I don’t know why you can’t go through a few months of peace for a change.”

“And if it helps,” Bodhi said, “we’ll distract you with regular sexual relations. –I said this was about the level of insight you could expect from me right now.”

“It’s not bad.” Jyn met his eyes first, and then Cassian’s. “I don’t think so, anyway.”

She had a second to let herself think that she could live with him saying no. She’d hold onto that love anyway, no matter what it looked like. If it wound up only being her and Bodhi in bed, that was fine: her heart, and who she let into it, was still her own business, and she’d lug all of them around her whole life. Not just these two, but K and Baze and Chirrut and Saw and her parents too.

But then Cassian said, “I can try,” and she heard the scratchiness of hope in his voice. That had almost gone since the end of the war, like victory had snuffed something out inside of him, and she hadn’t realized until now just how wrong it was to hear him without it. He smiled. “And I can—let myself be distracted. Not that you both aren’t already distracting enough as it is.”

The pressure in Jyn’s chest was somewhere between a sob and a shout.

***

They made love for the first time that night, but before anything else, they kissed. They were lying on three tangled-up, overlapping bed-mats, and they all threw stark shadows against the walls of Jyn’s tent.

She kissed Cassian first, feeling some obscure desire to screw him into place, like a bolt that would come loose if she wasn’t careful; his beard and mustache were silkier than she’d expected, and she had to brush her thumb over the stubble on his cheeks to get the kind of roughness that she half-wanted to come along and scrape her raw. It wasn’t gentleness she was lonely for, it was just—them, the more present the better. She turned to Bodhi next, almost nervous—would it bother him, that she’d gone to Cassian first? Would he think, again, that he was somehow extraneous to it all?

But no: Bodhi had understood. He cupped her cheek briefly and then leaned past her, kissing Cassian too, biting at his lips with what looked like the same ferocity Jyn had felt. Then the two of them finally collided, clumsy in their eagerness, and _fuck_ , he tasted good. She licked at the heat of his mouth, tasting him and Cassian both. It was strangely heady, like she was just drunk just off having them in her bed, off knowing they both had each other too. She felt like some part of her had been waiting for this ever since Scarif.

She leaned into Bodhi, bracing one hand against the ground, and suddenly—

Suddenly she could feel it, all of it. Her mind filled up with every blade of grass and every grain of sand on Dizars; she had the whole planet spinning in her head like a marble. She could see the village that stood on the other side of these hills, and she could hear the lowing of their herds; she knew one of the beasts was restless because it was heavily pregnant and its calves had almost come. They would be there by noon tomorrow. Chirrut and Baze were already asleep, and Baze was lying on his side, one arm pinned beneath Chirrut and slowly growing numb. She saw that a year from now, she would have Chirrut carefully split the kyber crystal on her necklace into thirds, and she would give the pieces to Bodhi and Cassian. Bodhi would string his around his neck, the way she did, but Cassian would choose a ring, instead.

“Jyn?” Bodhi ran his fingers back through her hair. “Are you all right?”

She picked her hand up off the ground. “Fine,” she said, because she was. For the first time in her life, something had leapt out to tell her that there was nothing here, and nothing coming soon, that she didn’t want. She didn’t think she’d get that kind of reassurance often—even peacetime wasn’t that lucky—but it was good for a night. She kissed Bodhi more deeply, and fumbled around one-handedly to try to strip Cassian of his shirt, and her senses fell pleasantly back down to scale: for right now, just the three of them.

***

Something else happened the day that Jyn asked Chirrut to cut up her necklace for her.

The temple was still not finished, but what was there was stable—if unfortunately open to rain and snow, neither of which were exactly infrequent events in this part of Dizars—and the children from the hillside village had started using it as a kind of play-court. They had some game that involved smacking a ball off the walls with their hands and feet, and, of the former members of _Rogue One_ , only Chirrut was any good at it. Jyn got used to seeing him with the children, drawn into their games—usually along with a halfheartedly protesting Baze.

But that day, she saw Cassian with them, too. He wasn’t playing, he was speaking rather intently to a tight knot of the older children.

Bodhi was closer to the little gathering than she was, so she met his eyes across the part of the temple they were working on, and he gave her one of the grins she never got tired of before he walked over.

“What’s he doing?” Jyn said.

“Teaching.” His face was flushed from the cold and the morning’s work, but his eyes were soft and bright with something else—with the same things she was feeling too. “Not strategy, not weapons, not spycraft. Language and Imperial-Alliance conflict history.”

Cassian looked more settled than he had since the Battle of Endor. She didn’t know if he even knew it yet, but she did, and so did Bodhi: he had a purpose again, a pipeline that could carry him to the future. He had something to work for.

Jyn rubbed a prickle of moisture out of her eyes. She said simply, “It’s good to see him like that,” knowing that Bodhi would understand everything she meant.

It wasn’t just that Cassian was happy, because he’d been happy with them, and she defied anyone to say otherwise. It was about seeing him _focused_ , seeing him be not just who he was but who he needed to be.

Bodhi just nodded and reached over, lacing his fingers in with hers.

“Every temple is a kind of school,” Chirrut said from behind them.

Jyn turned around to see him and Baze, each of them with a sandbag under one arm. She had the feeling that that wasn’t for construction but for another game the kids had struck up.

She said, “Did you know this was going to happen?”

“No,” Baze said. “Whatever he says, he didn’t.”

And maybe he hadn’t, but she had, she realized, with a sudden roaring in her ears drowning out whatever Chirrut _did_ say next.

She had thought, all this time, that she was just content to know that what she had seen and felt that night last year was possible. As the temple had grown up around them, she had thought—with only a little pang in her heart—that what she should really do with her necklace was give it to Chirrut. It would be the first—and maybe only—piece of kyber to be guarded in the new Temple of the Whills. It would only be symbolic, but then, that was what it had been for all this time anyway. It was just the meaning of it that would change, from her father’s love to her love for the people she’d come here with, her love for the stories she got out of Chirrut and Baze about their pasts on Jedha.

But the temple wasn’t about kyber, and it never had been. It wasn’t about the past at all. It was about one kind of future—and her necklace, if she wanted it to be, could be about another.

She wrapped her fingers around the crystal.

Into sixths, not thirds, she decided. She’d ask Chirrut about it tonight.


End file.
